EDITORS' CHOICE
Powerware 5115 1000i
Those on a budget will look for the cheapest solution and most of the time they will end up buying a UPS with a short battery life. Thirty minutes should be enough time for you to gracefully shutdown your workstation. You could buy a number of UPSs that will be able to run your workstation for around thirty minutes for a relatively small price. We decided to give two awards away. One was "bang for your buck" and the other for the UPS that had the longest staying power. The overall Editors' Choice went to the Powerware 5115 1000i. It exhibited very good battery life and it offers the best bang for your buck. It shipped with some great software that was easy to use and comprehensive. The Powerware 5115 1000i makes an excellent choice for those who don't have a big budget and need good backup for their workstation.
A Merit Award goes to the Upsonic Pro Power 1000 for its staying power. It was priced twice as high as the Powerware 5115 1000i but it had twice the battery life. The Upsonic Pro Power is also more of an industrial strength type UPS that is suited for servers rather than workstations.
Powerware 5115 1000i
How We Tested
The tests performed on the UPSs were straightforward. We devised a simple program in Visual Basic that recorded the system clock every 30 seconds from the time we pulled the power cord out from the UPS up until it shutdown our test-bed PC. The program time-stamped all the times into a text file.
We not only rated each of the UPSs by the way they performed, but we also evaluated the ease of setup, functionality (number of outlets, etc), software, and price. The test-bed used for the battery run-down was a Gateway Select 1000 PC. Fitted was an AMD Athlon 1GHz processor, with 128MB of RAM, 10GB IBM HDD, and a 19in Sony monitor.
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